Facebook's new 'Graph Search' could be social game changer

Facebook is unleashing the collective knowledge and opinions of its one billion users to power a new feature called Graph Search.

Last fall, Zuckerberg said in an on-stage interview that he was interested in pursuing search and that Facebook, at that point, already handled about a billion queries a day.

Even so, Gartner analyst Brian Blau said that didn't fully prepare the company to take on a search job as big as the one just launched.

"...This is new tech," he said. "They had to solve lots of tech problems, including natural language search and all the issues behind making the search real-time, while respecting the privacy and audience settings on each piece of content."

Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said this isn't a project that Facebook pulled off in the last few months.

"Great search is a very difficult, multi-year effort," said Moorhead. "Facebook had to leverage what they had with the current site, then add additional search filters and algorithms to take it to the next level. Instead of providing links to searches, it provides the data."